Corpus-based Open-Domain Event Type Induction

Abstract

Traditional event extraction methods require predefined event types and their corresponding annotations to learn event extractors. These prerequisites are often hard to be satisfied in real-world applications. This work presents a corpus-based open-domain event type induction method that automatically discovers a set of event types from a given corpus. As events of the same type could be expressed in multiple ways, we propose to represent each event type as a cluster of <predicate sense, object head> pairs. Specifically, our method (1) selects salient predicates and object heads, (2) disambiguates predicate senses using only a verb sense dictionary, and (3) obtains event types by jointly embedding and clustering <predicate sense, object head> pairs in a latent spherical space. Our experiments, on three datasets from different domains, show our method can discover salient and high-quality event types, according to both automatic and human evaluations.